Confused visitors will be forgiven for thinking Oregon State University is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Congressman Pete DeFazio and the “progressive-socialist” wing of the Democratic Party. Or for likening what’s going on there to political retribution as practiced in Third World thugocracies. (Townhall)

The European Union’s taxation commissioner plans to propose a new two-part fuel tax, split into a carbon tax of 20 euros per ton of CO2 and a minimum energy tax on motor fuels and heating fuels. (Reuters).

Thanks to EPA’s new greenhouse gas permitting authority, a proposed Wisconsin biomass plant has come under fire from green activists. According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel report:

It doesn’t make sense to issue a permit for the project because it would add emissions of carbon dioxide at a rate much higher than a natural gas-fueled power plant, said Mary Booth, an ecologist who is researching biomass projects for a national coalition called the Partnership for Policy Integrity.

“We looked at the permit numbers, and the emissions of greenhouse gases are six times higher from biomass than in the natural gas boiler,” she said. “It’s right there in the numbers, and yet they say we’re not going to consider any further use of natural gas as a way to make this facility cleaner because this is a biomass project.”

Check out this galling interview of William Ruckelshaus, the EPA administrator who banned DDT. While Ruckelshaus is correct in criticizing Members of Congress for essentially being willfully uninformed on environmental issues, his criticism is astonishingly arrogant given his own willful (and genocidal) ignorance of facts.

During 1971-1972, the EPA held seven months of hearings and produced 9,000 pages of testimony on DDT. In the end, the presiding EPA administrative law judge ruled that DDT use presented no danger to humans health or the environment. Without having attended a moment of the hearings or reading a page of the transcript, Ruckelshaus banned DDT in the U.S. anyway. The ban was then exported to the rest of the world, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of tens of millions, including millions of children under the age of 5 years.

The willful ignorance of the unapologetic Bill Ruckelshaus is still killing millions today. He’s the 20th century’s only mass murderer to survive and thrive (as a venture capitalist) in the 21st century.